In my romhack WIP, I have a character called Delta who I want to introduce as early as possible, but she’s a wyvern rider. I’m not sure when would be too early to introduce that kind of class. Does anyone have ideas or advice about this?
It’s common practice to give the first wyvern knight after the first pegasus knight, but you don’t necessarily have to do it that way. Just make sure you’re careful when balancing as a flying tank with decent speed can easily break the early game.
You should give them some kind of weakness. Maybe instead of the usual middling speed of wyverns, you could give them armour knight levels of speed. Or maybe try giving them low skill so they can’t reliably mow down huge swaths of enemies. Or perhaps you could put archers in precarious positions to effectively zone out the wyvern from certain areas. You could also give them low growths to prevent them from spiralling.
Regardless of the method, I think its doable, but will need careful balancing.
Whether Wyverns are “balanced” for your game depends on the context. Are archers commonly placed within your enemy placement? Are your maps large and open with many mountains to fly over? Do Wyverns wield Axes, or Lances? Is Thunder magic useless? Is Thunder magic effective against Wyverns? Consider factors similar to these to judge whether having them will disrupt your game’s balance.
Any class can work at any point in the game as long as you’ve taken the context of your game’s design into account. It’s all up to you.
Hope this helps.
There’s nothing strictly to say your Wyvern Rider has to have really good bases like most WR do; a neat trick I’ve found is that in FEBuilder, if you put a personal stat into the negatives, you can make it lower than the class bases.
Of course as the above people said, it depends on how far you are into the game and what you want to do with the character, but just something to keep in mind.
Its hard to pin an exact number on introduction, but we can roll with a hypothetical scenario:
-prologue and chapter for the MC to get a couple levels under their belt (bandit chapters, low level escape chapter, etc)
-introduced the concept/importance of counterplay/effectiveness (added an effective weapon, magic, bows, had the player both take advantage of/have to play against)
Those aren’t really “laws” before introducing a wyvern rider, and you may want to consider other factors (are they going to be your rescue bot? how well distributed is their weapon type? etc), but I could see a wyvern rider being introduced in chapter… 4? But if you are going with the tradition of them defecting from the enemy side, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to utilize that by having other wyvern riders hunt them down… it which case, you want to have 1 or more tools on the player side to deal with 1 or more enemy wyverns (bows, magic, high defense sponge unit, etc) and not have it down to Delta having to potentially solo one or more wyverns on their own
Do you mean recruited and made playable by “introduced” or simply appearing? Because lots of Wyverns in Fire Emblem games such as Minerva, Melady and Cormag appear in cutscenes or as enemies much earlier than they become recruitable.